Berthoff, Ann. The Mysterious Barricades: Language and Its Limits. University of Toronto Press, 1999. Print.
Ah, the conservatism here?: “In the newest critical fashions, sociology–of an unhistorical positivist sort–has succeeded to linguistics as the chief source of models for literary study, which is approximating what it was in teh days before the New Criticism–that is, a strange amalgam of reading for message (even for uplift) and an egregious literary history in which race ,moment, milieu have been reinvented as ethnicity, gender, and whatever theme of oppression has gained attention for the time being…” (4).
We must “accounty for meaning, representation, and interpretation in logical, not merely psychological, terms” (4).\
Dyadic vs. triadic semiotics
C.S. Pierce: “the triadic semiotic of C.S. Pierce accounts for interpretation in logical terms: interpretation is a constituent of the sign” (not the “signfier”)…(5).
“…representamen sybolizes an object by means of a meaning, which he called the interpretant, in contradistinction to the interpreter. To understand interpretaion as a third element of the sign is to recognize mediation–and once mediation is understood not as constituting a barrier but as a logical condition of signification, there will be certain epistemological consequences, chief among them the recognition that all knowledge is interpretation and that all interpretation must itself be interpreted” (5).
“the heuristic power of limits”–MM!!!! (5).
Is “code” and “code-switching” as a metaphor tied to the dyadic? (5/6)
Positivism: “a conviction that concrete particulars ‘come first,’ before concepts, and that they are more important than anything’abstract’; an ardent willingness to worship what Susanne K. Langer calls the ‘Idols of the Laboratory’; a fear or a contempt (or at least a distate) for dialectical thinking; a distrust of the idea of ‘interpretation,’ which is set over against ‘explanation’ ” (6).
“My contention is that both hard-nosed positivism and its mystic variants are fostered by a view of the meaning relationship as two-valued” (6).
(8): Sapir, Cassirer, Schleiermacher, Pierce, Langer, Walker Percy
Cassirer: “That he could treat languages as cultural elements meant not that Sapier reduced linguistic forms to empty structures but that he saw all human acts and artifacts as symbolic forms which are at once instruments and products. This dialectical understanding is at the heart of Sapir’s conception of linguistics as ‘a tool in the sciences of man.’ He shares it with Cassirer and all those whose basic premise is that we see man’s life in ‘the mirror of culture'” (8).
“two tasks of language–the universal logical task and the social task–makes it possible to differentiate language and discourse, the formal structures and what we do with them. (The conflation of language and discourse is perhaps the most destructive consequence of dyadic semiotics)” (8).
“By way of an exploration of symbolization and imagination, of the powers of language and art, and of the process of feeling, her [Langer’s] life work constitutes a genuine philosophical anthropology, the human science which fulfills the promise unrealized by psychology or linguistics” (9).
Walker Percy: “the importance of tradicity for an appreciation of metaphor and its heuristic power…”
“Support for the argument about the heuristic power of limits could be found in Vygotsky and Bakhtin, Bachelard and Barfield–and so on” (9-10).
“the revolutionary doctrine of the Interpretant” (10).
“Ideas to think with”….
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